I heard that proposition put forward
many times by young officers of ours, and as an argument against their
own sacrifice they found it unanswerable.
V
The condition and psychology of their own country as they read about
it in the Paris Daily Mail, which was first to come into their
billets, filled some of these young men with distress and disgust,
strengthened into rage when they went home on leave. The deliberate
falsification of news (the truth of which they heard from private
channels) made them discredit the whole presentation of our case and
state. They said, "Propaganda!" with a sharp note of scorn. The breezy
optimism of public men, preachers, and journalists, never downcast by
black news, never agonized by the slaughter in these fields,
minimizing horrors and loss and misery, crowing over the enemy,
prophesying early victory which did not come, accepting all the
destruction of manhood (while they stayed safe) as a necessary and
inevitable "misfortune," had a depressing effect on men who knew they
were doomed to die, in the law of averages, if the war went on.
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